Since the Occupy Wall Street protest is growing by the day, with ongoing developments, this post will serve as an open thread for news and opinions related to the Occupy Wall Street protests.

It began as an internet-generated sit-in type protest, intended as a reflection of the democratic protests in Egypt and the Middle East, where the people of a nation came together to demand change from being oppressed by a powerful and wealthy elite. It was and is decentralized as true populist movements often are (they don’t have corporate and media sponsorship, you listening Tea Party?).

Initially, the corporately owned Mainstream Media, which covers Tea Party events attended by a less than a dozen oddballs, used the tactic of ignoring the protest to bury it. Then, after the YouTube video of police brutality against the peaceful protestors, specifically, the macing of young women who were helplessly penned in by police at the time, the MSM was forced to report on and recognize the protest but did so by ridiculing and trying to trivialize those participating in it, as whale and tree hugging hippies that don’t even know why they’re doing what they’re doing.

As more and more validation pushed back on this campaign to smother awareness and validity of the protest, greater coverage on more Progressive-friendly outlets grew and a large march took place. It resulted in the possibly illegal arrest of 700 people as they crossed the Brooklyn Bridge. This march and arrest was covered as the day’s top news story and obliterated the legitimacy of the MSM’s campaign to portray the protest as irrelevant and the participants as just a few nutty college brats…but that campaign continues for some in the MSM anyway.

In the aftermath of this march, companion protests began popping up around the nation, in 399 cities as of today (423 worldwide) according to Occupy Together, an unofficial organizing and clearing house site for these protests.

Another march has been taking place today in NY, the largest yet which is currently estimated at 10,000 to 17,000 people, joined by Chinatown Tenants Union, the Transit Workers Union and community organizations like the Working Families Party. Also, MoveOn.org is sponsoring an online protest and United NY. Organizers called for students at college campuses across the nation to walk out of class in protest.

As mentioned above, none of this however derails the continued but disqualified propaganda in the MSM to try and marginalize this growing movement. The latest meme which seems to be repeated by Wall Street and MSM hacks alike is that this protest IS NOT a legitimate populist movement like the Tea Party (huh?) and is instead more like the non-mainstream anarchic protests by radical youth against the World Bank, capitalism and reality. There is also a growing propaganda meme that the Wall Street protestors “clashed” with police and that “as opposed to protests in other cities, these protestors in Los Angeles say they want a peaceful protest” (BTW, this was reported on MSNBC)…the takeaway of course is to brand this protest as mindless and violent.

IMO, these continuing propagandist attempts to disqualify what is now a national protest that may already be bigger than the current membership of the Tea Party, are futile and desperate. It may also be a form of denial in those who simply don’t want to believe that a popular uprising is going on. These types actually believe that the message of, “We need to stop corporate greed from destroying us” can be spun into being an extremist and goofball sensibility.

Aside from the criticism on the Left that there is no specific set of demands, there needs to be more focus and leadership, the Occupy Wall Street movement doesn’t have to be a conventional protest. It can instead be what it seems to have evolved into, a philosophical umbrella under which most Americans can come together. Then, once unified, the majority that is being ignored on many issues by its government, chiefly by Republicans, will have the power and presence that requires attention and action on their pressing issues.

Bottom line, Occupy Wall Street is about the empowerment of the people over the top 1%. As hard as it is for most Americans to unite behind the same specific issue, there is a brilliance in getting people to unite behind a general issue that is the cause of most of the more specific issues.

There is no knowing at this point if this phenomena will continue to grow into a full fledged and influential movement of the people, by the people and for the people but at this point, it is an exciting prospect.

Chicago, IL — The National Lawyers Guild (NLG) condemns a preemptive police raid that took place at approximately 11:30pm Wednesday in the Bridgeport neighborhood, and instances of harassment on the street, in which Chicago police are unlawfully detaining, searching, and questioning NATO protesters. The Bridgeport raid was apparently conducted by the Organized Crime Division of the Chicago Police Department and resulted in as many as 8 arrests.

According to witnesses in Bridgeport, police broke down a door to access a 6-unit apartment building near 32nd & Morgan Streets without a search warrant. Police entered an apartment with guns drawn and tackled one of the tenants to the floor in his kitchen. Two tenants were handcuffed for more than 2 hours in their living room while police searched their apartment and a neighboring unit, repeatedly calling one of the tenants a “Commie faggot.” A search warrant produced 4 hours after police broke into the apartment was according to witnesses. Among items seized by police in the Bridgeport raid were beer-making supplies and at least one cell phone.

And

In another incident, 3 plainclothes police officers unlawfully stopped, handcuffed, and searched a NATO protester on Michigan Avenue and Wacker Drive at approximately 2pm today. According to the protester, he did not consent to a search and there was no probable cause to detain him. The police also photographed and questioned him about where he was from, how he got to Chicago, how long it took, what he was doing here, where he was staying, who he was with, and how long he was planning to say in Chicago. The protester refused to answer any questions and was eventually released.

And many Union Longshoreman are not the least bit happy about their actions. I agree. What is the purpose of shutting down the ports and harming many the many workers, part of the 99%? I have known many Longshoreman, and they don’t work daily with a 40 hour week, they work “on call” and need the job when called.

Exactly what did closing the ports accomplish? Were the Longshoreman part of selling sham mortgages, robo-signing, sending jobs overseas?

Occupy Wall Street protests spread to U.S. West Coast ports as demonstrators tried to halt shipping operations and cut into profits at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., which owns a stake in the largest cargo-terminal operator.

That isn’t missing part of the puzzle for me, AdLib, I think the protest was misdirected and harmed workers vastly more than it did the multinational corporations and banks. Goldman-Sachs lost .00001 percent of the days profits over this action, the blue collar worker lost putting food on the table/ a Christmas present for their kid a days pay… and I stand by my thinking that it was misdirected and misguided.

A huge turnout for an “informational picket line” would have worked, been in the news, but this took a days wages out of the pockets of blue collar union workers and that doesn’t buy the baby new shoes!

All OWS protests impact fellow 99% workers. One of the RW’s favorite attacks on OWS in NYC was that their presence in the park was hurting local businesses, disrupting traffic, hurting cab drivers and lower paid office workers who had trouble getting to work.

How do you effectively hold a big enough or impacting enough protest against corporations to call attention to a wrong without also impacting fellow 99%ers who work in and around who and where you’re protesting?

If a majority of people oppose making sacrifices in the present to fight for a better future, then the ongoing decline of income and the standard of living for 99% of Americans, including those who don’t want to lose money due to a protest, would just continue.

Then, they would lose far more than a day’s pay as their salaries keep declining and the cost of living rises, as has been happening for the last 30 years.

On the other hand, if the movement OWS is pushing results in greater economic justice for most Americans, the benefits would far outweigh a day’s pay.

It is a fact that the 99% are entwined (and exploited) by the corporations and their myriad businesses. It’s also true that these same corporations are dedicated to decimating the incomes and futures of those who work for them (and the rest of the 99%).

Protesting at and disrupting any corporation’s business does necessarily mean that truck drivers, secretaries, sales reps, etc. could have their work and pay disrupted as well.

I don’t see how to target a corporation, even through boycotting, that doesn’t negatively impact other 99%ers in the short term who work for that corporation.

I would respectfully disagree on your proposition, I don’t think an informational picket line is very “sexy” to news outlets and would have gotten much if any coverage. Closing ports is news but picketing in front of them while business as usual continues, isn’t necessarily “news”.

I do think their protest was justified and not improper though I do agree that ideally, it would be best to find ways to protest that are newsworthy and high profile but minimize the pain on other 99%ers trying to get by in this plutocracy just like OWS.

QUANTICO, Va.—Police deployment of sonic blasters at Occupy Wall Street and G-20 protest rallies is fueling both sales and criticism of the devices, which emit beams of sound with laser-like intensity.

More U.S. police and emergency-response agencies are using the so-called Long-Range Acoustic Devices instead of megaphones or conventional loudspeakers for crowd control, according to news reports and leading manufacturer LRAD Corp. of San Diego.

[…]

He said LRAD is not a weapon but a long-range communication system for clearly broadcasting information, instructions and warnings.

The products range from a 15-pound, battery-operated, hand-held unit to a 320-pound device with an advertised range of nearly 2 miles. Even the smallest unit, the LRAD 100X, emits as much as 137 decibels at 1 meter. That’s louder than a jet takeoff at 100 meters but lower than the pain threshold of 140 decibels, according to the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

Gotta drown out those hippie drum circles, ya know. I’m waiting for them to start using the “crowd dispersers that makes one’s skin feel like it’s burning. That will be next.

Saw a 60 Minutes piece on non-lethal weapons and the take away was that, instead of them just substituting for lethal force, their non-lethal nature has resulted in far more frequent use of weapons by police on citizens.

They want to use sound weapons, OWS should surround NYPD stations with boom boxes turned up to 11 and playing “Welcome to the Jungle”.

About 2000 protesters went to our state capital of Olympia to protest the special session that the Gov. has called to solve the 2 billion dollar budget gap that plagues the state. Right now about 46% of the gap is expected to be solved by cuts, and about 7% by new revenues, with the rest unclear.

About 100 of those protesters camped out in the rotunda until they were forcibly removed by police, including 3 that were tased when they “advanced” on state troopers.

What’s interesting is that the Governor and Legislators seemed completely surprised by the showing and were unsure how to handle the various groups occupying the Governors office and committee meetings.

The missing context from this story is that Washington has experienced a rash of tax measures over the last 10 years that have severely hamstrung its budgetary flexibility. No fewer than 20 anti-tax measures have been proposed with many of them passing that takes tax control out of the legislature’s hands and puts it into the hands of the voters.

Nearly any change in the tax code has to be presented to the public for a vote. Not surprisingly (as my friends in CA know) WA has resoundingly voted to tax themselves like libertarians and live like socialists. Income tax measures have been defeated for the last 20 years with no end in sight, while the sales tax here in King County stand at an average of about 9%.

The fact that the public seems willing to shoulder an additional half-cent sales tax hike to help pay for things is commendable, but the protesters are correct that this solution comes on the backs of a populace already stressed by economic woes.

Interesting news. I think it’s a good decision to crackdown on local police this way because as the top executive Obama does not want to say something to make locals lose face. I know some progressives want Obama to “speak out” but I just don’t see where that helps more than having the DOJ look into it.

Sally -- this is sort of freaky. Apparently she did, some of the early Baggers have joined, and I remain deeply skeptical of their motivations AND their impact on the choices the movements they’ve infiltrated make because of their presence. Creeps me out.

Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone pretty much captures where I stand on the movement (except for the 1st sentence--I was never mixed about it.):

The first few times I went down to Zuccotti Park, I came away with mixed feelings. I loved the energy and was amazed by the obvious organic appeal of the movement, the way it was growing on its own. But my initial impression was that it would not be taken very seriously by the Citibanks and Goldman Sachs of the world. You could put 50,000 angry protesters on Wall Street, 100,000 even, and Lloyd Blankfein is probably not going to break a sweat. He knows he’s not going to wake up tomorrow and see Cornel West or Richard Trumka running the Federal Reserve. He knows modern finance is a giant mechanical parasite that only an expert surgeon can remove. Yell and scream all you want, but he and his fellow financial Frankensteins are the only ones who know how to turn the machine off. That’s what I was thinking during the first few weeks of the protests. But I’m beginning to see another angle. Occupy Wall Street was always about something much bigger than a movement against big banks and modern finance. It’s about providing a forum for people to show how tired they are not just of Wall Street, but everything. This is a visceral, impassioned, deep-seated rejection of the entire direction of our society, a refusal to take even one more step forward into the shallow commercial abyss of phoniness, short-term calculation, withered idealism and intellectual bankruptcy that American mass society has become. If there is such a thing as going on strike from one’s own culture, this is it. And by being so broad in scope and so elemental in its motivation, it’s flown over the heads of many on both the right and the left. The right-wing media wasted no time in cannon-blasting the movement with its usual idiotic cliches, casting Occupy Wall Street as a bunch of dirty hippies who should get a job and stop chewing up Mike Bloomberg’s police overtime budget with their urban sleepovers. Just like they did a half-century ago, when the debate over the Vietnam War somehow stopped being about why we were brutally murdering millions of innocent Indochinese civilians and instead became a referendum on bralessness and long hair and flower-child rhetoric, the depraved flacks of the right-wing media have breezily blown off a generation of fraud and corruption and market-perverting bailouts, making the whole debate about the protesters themselves – their hygiene, their “envy” of the rich, their “hypocrisy.” The protesters, chirped Supreme Reichskank Ann Coulter, needed three things: “showers, jobs and a point.” Her colleague Charles Krauthammer went so far as to label the protesters hypocrites for having iPhones. OWS, he said, is “Starbucks-sipping, Levi’s-clad, iPhone-clutching protesters [denouncing] corporate America even as they weep for Steve Jobs, corporate titan, billionaire eight times over.” Apparently, because Goldman and Citibank are corporations, no protester can ever consume a corporate product – not jeans, not cellphones and definitely not coffee – if he also wants to complain about tax money going to pay off some billionaire banker’s bets against his own crappy mortgages. Meanwhile, on the other side of the political spectrum, there were scads of progressive pundits like me who wrung our hands with worry that OWS was playing right into the hands of assholes like Krauthammer. Don’t give them any ammunition! we counseled. Stay on message! Be specific! We were all playing the Rorschach-test game with OWS, trying to squint at it and see what we wanted to see in the movement. Viewed through the prism of our desire to make near-term, within-the-system changes, it was hard to see how skirmishing with cops in New York would help foreclosed-upon middle-class families in Jacksonville and San Diego. What both sides missed is that OWS is tired of all of this. They don’t care what we think they’re about, or should be about. They just want something different. We’re all born wanting the freedom to imagine a better and more beautiful future. But modern America has become a place so drearily confining and predictable that it chokes the life out of that built-in desire. Everything from our pop culture to our economy to our politics feels oppressive and unresponsive. We see 10 million commercials a day, and every day is the same life-killing chase for money, money and more money; the only thing that changes from minute to minute is that every tick of the clock brings with it another space-age vendor dreaming up some new way to try to sell you something or reach into your pocket. The relentless sameness of the two-party political system is beginning to feel like a Jacob’s Ladder nightmare with no end; we’re entering another turn on the four-year merry-go-round, and the thought of having to try to get excited about yet another minor quadrennial shift in the direction of one or the other pole of alienating corporate full-of-shitness is enough to make anyone want to smash his own hand flat with a hammer. If you think of it this way, Occupy Wall Street takes on another meaning. There’s no better symbol of the gloom and psychological repression of modern America than the banking system, a huge heartless machine that attaches itself to you at an early age, and from which there is no escape. You fail to receive a few past-due notices about a $19 payment you missed on that TV you bought at Circuit City, and next thing you know a collector has filed a judgment against you for $3,000 in fees and interest. Or maybe you wake up one morning and your car is gone, legally repossessed by Vulture Inc., the debt-buying firm that bought your loan on the Internet from Chase for two cents on the dollar. This is why people hate Wall Street. They hate it because the banks have made life for ordinary people a vicious tightrope act; you slip anywhere along the way, it’s 10,000 feet down into a vat of razor blades that you can never climb out of. That, to me, is what Occupy Wall Street is addressing. People don’t know exactly what they want, but as one friend of mine put it, they know one thing: FUCK THIS SHIT! We want something different: a different life, with different values, or at least a chance at different values. There was a lot of snickering in media circles, even by me, when I heard the protesters talking about how Liberty Square was offering a model for a new society, with free food and health care and so on. Obviously, a bunch of kids taking donations and giving away free food is not a long-term model for a new economic system. But now, I get it. People want to go someplace for at least five minutes where no one is trying to bleed you or sell you something. It may not be a real model for anything, but it’s at least a place where people are free to dream of some other way for human beings to get along, beyond auctioned “democracy,” tyrannical commerce and the bottom line. We’re a nation that was built on a thousand different utopian ideas, from the Shakers to the Mormons to New Harmony, Indiana. It was possible, once, for communities to experiment with everything from free love to an end to private property. But nowadays even the palest federalism is swiftly crushed. If your state tries to place tariffs on companies doing business with some notorious human-rights-violator state – like Massachusetts did, when it sought to bar state contracts to firms doing business with Myanmar – the decision will be overturned by some distant global bureaucracy like the WTO. Even if 40 million Californians vote tomorrow to allow themselves to smoke a joint, the federal government will never permit it. And the economy is run almost entirely by an unaccountable oligarchy in Lower Manhattan that absolutely will not sanction any innovations in banking or debt forgiveness or anything else that might lessen its predatory influence. And here’s one more thing I was wrong about: I originally was very uncomfortable with the way the protesters were focusing on the NYPD as symbols of the system. After all, I thought, these are just working-class guys from the Bronx and Staten Island who have never seen the inside of a Wall Street investment firm, much less had anything to do with the corruption of our financial system. But I was wrong. The police in their own way are symbols of the problem. All over the country, thousands of armed cops have been deployed to stand around and surveil and even assault the polite crowds of Occupy protesters. This deployment of law-enforcement resources already dwarfs the amount of money and manpower that the government “committed” to fighting crime and corruption during the financial crisis. One OWS protester steps in the wrong place, and she immediately has police roping her off like wayward cattle. But in the skyscrapers above the protests, anything goes. This is a profound statement about who law enforcement works for in this country. What happened on Wall Street over the past decade was an unparalleled crime wave. Yet at most, maybe 1,500 federal agents were policing that beat – and that little group of financial cops barely made any cases at all. Yet when thousands of ordinary people hit the streets with the express purpose of obeying the law and demonstrating their patriotism through peaceful protest, the police response is immediate and massive. There have already been hundreds of arrests, which is hundreds more than we ever saw during the years when Wall Street bankers were stealing billions of dollars from retirees and mutual-fund holders and carpenters unions through the mass sales of fraudulent mortgage-backed securities. It’s not that the cops outside the protests are doing wrong, per se, by patrolling the parks and sidewalks. It’s that they should be somewhere else. They should be heading up into those skyscrapers and going through the file cabinets to figure out who stole what, and from whom. They should be helping people get their money back. Instead, they’re out on the street, helping the Blankfeins of the world avoid having to answer to the people they ripped off. People want out of this fiendish system, rigged to inexorably circumvent every hope we have for a more balanced world. They want major changes. I think I understand now that this is what the Occupy movement is all about. It’s about dropping out, if only for a moment, and trying something new, the same way that the civil rights movement of the 1960s strived to create a “beloved community” free of racial segregation. Eventually the Occupy movement will need to be specific about how it wants to change the world. But for right now, it just needs to grow. And if it wants to sleep on the streets for a while and not structure itself into a traditional campaign of grassroots organizing, it should. It doesn’t need to tell the world what it wants. It is succeeding, for now, just by being something different.

Nothing like taking a full week to find something so utterly riveting. Cher, thanks so much for posting this. The whole Thanksgiving thing combined with work kept me from staying current.

But this is one hell of a beautifully written piece. And it totally resonates with me. I wish I had the courage and strength and ability to pull away from my job and commit that these young people have shown. (But — hey, someone has to take care of people who have been batonned in the bean, too.)

Taibbi’s so eloquent. E.g.:

This is why people hate Wall Street. They hate it because the banks have made life for ordinary people a vicious tightrope act; you slip anywhere along the way, it’s 10,000 feet down into a vat of razor blades that you can never climb out of.

People who don’t even know that they sympathize with OWS, sympathize with OWS.

Again, I say thanks, Cher, for getting this onto the site. It was well worth reading. Again and again.

Cher Taibbi is right about the politics and maybe even right about what most of the OWS is all about but like many on the left many on the left if he thinks this is what most Americans want, he’s completely wrong. Americans want it ALL and have always wanted it ALL. The most cars, the most houses, the most money, the most everything.

This was the point of that Daily Show video. While a big percentage perhaps even a majority of OWS protesters love drum circles and don’t mind camping out most Americans just want a bigger piece of the pie and most importantly want their kids to have a bigger piece of the pie than their parents had. This is the part of the American Dream Wall Street, Corporations and mostly Republicans have undermined for unprecedented greed.

I’m not saying Americans don’t want to value family, friends or even there belief systems but we’ve never been a society that values community like many parts of the world. While we’ve always been a country ravenous for wealth and possessions.

It’s also ridiculous to say America has become more dreary and predictable. He is talking about the way it was under the Soviet block. We have more freedoms now to pick our careers than even at the height of the middle class where most Americans were tied to jobs in manufacturing and farming where we just did repetitive tasks. Taibbi’s ability to have the career he has alone shows how untrue that statement is. The think most oppressive about our society is the millions of voices all screaming at once.

His statement about Marijuana is pure progressive naivete. For one I’m for at least decriminalizing Marijuana possession, but even CA voters rejected that when they had the change. To say State laws should trump Federal law just shows he doesn’t understand the system. Would he want red states to overturn Roe v. Wade via legislation? I think not.

Of course the system is corrupt and there are major changes needed. There are major changes needed just to bring back the American Dream.

I’m not trying to be negative. I just think he’s getting parts of the big picture wrong. Like most people on the left he has a hard time putting himself in middle America’s shoes. Most Americans don’t want a progressive Utopia. Not yet anyway.

America needs a new dream. “Most Americans” desire for trivial, unnecessary garbage is destroying the habitability of the planet. I for one don’t want any piece of the pie, let alone a bigger slice. That pie is poison.

OK, came back from chores and just don’t have the energy to write all that again. The main point is that Taibbi didn’t say that most Americans feel the way the protesters do, but rather that is what the protesters feel, and those who support them. Also, I don’t know enough to speak for most Americans and only for myself and the people I know, so who know? You may be right about how Americans feel and what they want. But he does articulate how I feel.

Honestly his writing in this piece was all over the place (obviously train of thought writing). I’m still not sure about all the points he was trying to make. But some of his random shot taking and inferences where off the mark a number of times in my eyes. If he’s only talking about what the protesters want then he’s missing the whole point of the 99% completely. I thought OWS was suppose to be about what the 99% (the vast majority of Americans) feels or at least wants. Otherwise it’s just another left wing cause with a little anarchy mixed in for good measure. I know the real problem is there is no consensus for what the country feels or wants nowadays, save for more cheap goods and cheap gas.

KQ, I just wrote you a very long response that took me about 20 minutes and I pressed some stupid fucking button and it’s gone now. I am too discouraged by that to write again right now, so I’m going to do some chores, but I want to get back to you! Later, ok?

After last night’s pretty sad candlelight vigil/funeral at Keiner Plaza ended with a call to gather today at the Plaza….and 500 to 1000 did (depends on whose estimate you use).

About 20 arrested when they wanted to get past a police blockade, couldn’t so they sat down and were removed in plastic cable ties.

Kind of a weird crowd….young activists, a bunch of college folks from area universities, a big group of Teamsters, old folks like me, moms with strollers…..signs, chants, songs, speakers focus on First Amendment, culture of greed, concerns about the super-committee, fears re. loss of SS, medicare, medicaid

Next rally on Saturday….

Off to the side…..hard work going on around the need to focus on key demands.

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Speakers Corner

With all of the hoopla surrounding the films screened in the Obama White House, I got curious about what the past presidents watched. What follows is by no means complete, but an interesting bit of history.

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The film is a truly great mixture of drama, resistance to the forces of politics, the adroit combination comedy, and love story, in a culinary battle for the utmost Michilin Star rating for an established French fine dining enterprise that is a mere 100 feet apart from a brand new (to the village) Indian restaraunt.

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India's finance minister pledged major investment in
infrastructure on Saturday, saying it was time for the economy to
"fly", as he unveiled the new right-wing government's first full
budget. Arun Jaitley said his government had inherited an economy
dominated by "doom and gloom" when it took power last year,
trumpeting its achievements in conquering inflation and
kickstarting growth. The world is predicting this is India's chance
to fly," he said. Prime Minister Narendra Modi swept to power last
year on a pledge to revive India's flagging economic fortunes and
provide jobs for its rapidly growing population of over 1.2
billion.

JOHANNESBURG (AP) — The southern African nation of Lesotho on
Saturday held an early election aimed at overcoming tension among
political factions that has led to violence among security forces
since last year.

An aircraft from Libyan forces controlling Tripoli crashed
near the Tunisian border and may have been shot down, Tunisia's
state news agency TAP reported on Friday. The aircraft went down 5
kilometers from the frontier inside Libya, TAP said, but did not
provide any further details.

Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, a fierce critic of
President Vladimir Putin, was gunned down while walking in sight of
the Kremlin late Friday, prompting an international chorus of
condemnation. French President Francois Hollande on Saturday
condemned the murder of Nemtsov, calling him a "defender of
democracy". The outspoken critic of Russia's involvement in Ukraine
was "a courageous and tireless defender of democracy who was
committed to the fight against corruption," the president's office
said in a statement. The murder of the 55-year-old politician, came
ahead of a major opposition rally he was set to lead this weekend
and sent shock waves across the country.

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negotiate a power-sharing deal to end the conflict in the country,
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Security Council resolution on the measure to the 15-member body on
Tuesday but stopped short of proposing an arms embargo or placing
specific individuals on a blacklist. "To apply a punitive measure
now would send out what kind of a message – a right message or
wrong message?" China is a Security Council veto-wielding member,
along with Russia, the United States, France and Britain. Thousands
of people have been killed and more than a million have fled their
homes since fighting erupted in South Sudan in December 2013
between soldiers allied to President Salva Kiir and those loyal to
his former deputy Riek Machar.

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Russia's role in the Ukraine crisis, was shot dead steps from the
Kremlin in a murder that underscored the risks taken by the Russian
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assailants in a white car as he walked across a bridge over the
Moskva River in central Moscow with a Ukrainian woman, who was
unhurt, just before midnight on Friday, police said. A former
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15-year-rule.

By Ahmed Tolba and Ayman al-Warfalli CAIRO/BENGHAZI (Reuters) -
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al-Thinni said his government would stop dealing with Turkey
because it was sending weapons to a rival group in Tripoli so that
"the Libyan people kill each other". Two administrations, one in
the capital and Thinni's in the east, have been battling for power
since the armed group Libya Dawn seized Tripoli in July and
reinstated lawmakers from a previous assembly, four years after
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strongly denied Thinni's allegations.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Illinois Rep. Aaron Schock repaid $40,000
from his personal checking account for redecorations to his
congressional office in the style of the TV show "Downton Abbey,"
according to financial records reviewed by The Associated
Press.